 Now, well to California. It's theCUBE at Pier 2.0, brought to you by the Pier 2.0 Foundations. Learn, connect, and grow. Now, here are your hosts, John Berger and Jeff Frick. Come back, everyone, if you're here live in Silicon Valley, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle and Cove's theCUBE with Jeff Frick, our next guest at J. Allison, serial entrepreneur, luminary in the social media community, founder of multiple companies, also involved in hosting way back in the day, we're here at Pier 2.0. Welcome to theCUBE. It's my pleasure to be here. Great to have you. I'll see, you're certainly familiar with TV, you're the third founder of, got that funded back in the early days. I'll see you dig one of the first crowd sourcing communities of its time, really kind of changed the game for social media, really established social media. But going back and hosting, back in the days when you go found Equinix, you know, the evolution of freedom and getting information out there, you've been a big part of, so congratulations. Thanks, yeah. I mean, it's sort of shocking, giving a presentation today, just talking about the history of stuff, thinking about the fact that the internet was so not robust only 15 years ago. Now, everyone depends on it for everything. And yeah, there is a lot of folks who had to work really hard to get it to this point. You remember the days back when you had to buy like $25,000, you know, DSU for router, you had to buy a sun server, now it's DevOps, you just pop it into the cloud. It's ridiculous. I mean, just talk about from your experience, how much of a magnitude of order of change is that? I mean, a lot of the new guys come in, they've never even loaded a Linux batch before. I mean, just to give you and your viewers a sense of just how crazy it was, so in order to get an enterprise connected to the internet, which by the way predate the web, so the only purpose they had was to email themselves, because there wasn't anyone else on the internet to email, we would literally pre-configure a router and a DSU CSU or a modem if you know, depending and box it up ourselves because there was no way that we could expect a user to go on and configure a router and ship it to them and then have to talk them through on the phone how to get that stuff live. And then they connect to the internet and the next question was the deadly one. Okay, what do I do now? Why am I here? But we just kept doing it. People were paying like $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 a month for a T1 in 1994. And there was just the enthusiasts and then yeah, the problem was, as you pointed out, you got these carriers, well, you got these carrier hotels that were, for lack of a better word, central offices. Like try to imagine like a wet, concrete, dark, ugly, not very friendly location and all of the internet was basically dependent on these buildings. In fact, the largest exchange point in the world was in Tyson's Corner, Virginia in a parking garage. I'm not kidding. And so if you drove your car through a little wall that was like a drywall, you would take down the entire internet in 1995. In 1995, 96, and so yeah. So Equinix, yeah, people, they still pay per month, but it's a different universe. You know, in the Aussie software, it was bought by IBM, you saw the bare metal movement still kind of going on. You still have the enterprise needs. You started a company recently, we'll talk about it in a second, but Peer 2.0, this isn't a grassroots organization of internet engineering dudes, right, who have actually built large-scale networks, you know, from scratch, we're talking about the old DSUCSU days now to full-on big network where there's a lot at stake, you know, net neutrality, you got the innovation of things like Netflix, which came out of all this greatness, you know, you involved the dig. What is this group of these internet engineering industry guys? What are they doing? What's the purpose? What's going on? Folks, what's happening with Peer 2.0? I think there's two important categories of people attending something like this. One category is, of course, the traditional peering engineers. These are the guys who literally guard the gates. They're the ones who configure the routers that allow a network like, I don't know, like Google's network for Gmail to connect to AOL so that emails can travel from one to the other, right? These guys have been the same guys for like 10 years, right? And so part of the crowd are those original folks, and I know them all from the years of doing that. But the other group, since we've gone all virtualized with cloud services, now there's this whole other group of people who want to connect directly, not necessarily for that purpose, but to Amazon Web Services, say, or to any of the SaaS services that make up an enterprise. And so now interconnection is no longer just for that, you know, 100 people who are doing it. For now, it's any enterprise cares about this stuff. It's much bigger than it used to be. And also there's security involved, so you talk about, you know, there's also traffic issues like this quality of service has always been the big debate of, okay, I got to traverse different carriers, different networks, who's doing deep packet inspection, U.S., foreign, this is all huge issues, right? Well, the more diverse you are, the less of a single point where a person can monitor you, you know? And that's always been true. I think one of the challenges right now politically is that there's a bit of a confusion between network neutrality, this issue of the last mile to the home and, you know, preferential treatment, and network interconnection, which actually hasn't changed. Companies like Netflix have been connecting to companies like Comcast, that's how the internet works for like the last 20 years. It's just that now it gets attention because it gets conflated accidentally with this, you know, fast lane issue. Obviously, you know, the freedom of the internet's all, you know, a sink-oom by yah-hey, you know? Smokes on that free internet. But the reality is there's some business to be done here. IAX just got funding $10 million from NDA. So there's obviously business to be had, there's still innovation happening. Obviously, you know, you started a company around SaaS. We have our CrowdChat application, all DevOps. This new school of startups are coming out where they don't need a zillion dollars to get started because they don't have the tax, open source, and cloud combined give the entry startup ability to get going. So what's the business model? Where's the innovation? Well, it's, okay. So it's true that it costs less money to start a company. And that's awesome, believe me. If I had that freedom to start a company for so cheap, I would have started twice as many companies, you know, and it would have been great. That also means, though, that there's a greater percentage of companies that don't make it. The good news is there is less at stake. So if you test an idea with your market and it doesn't work, you know, there aren't people who have lost tens of millions of dollars on your attempt. The other thing is the speed of deployment is insane. I mean, what's happening now is a typical company, like I walk into these businesses all the time in San Francisco, they're deploying code every hour. And if it breaks, you know, it regress back to the last version. It's not that big a deal. You know, it's like, it is a completely different universe of speed and innovation. And that's awesome. It creates a little chaos in managing all of that, you know, and the company I started a year and a half ago, OpSomatic, I co-founded it with Jim Stoneman and Mikhail Benchenko. It's basically around all that chaos. Like if you've got all of this, you know, rapid deployment and so forth, how do you manage that? How do you keep an eye on everything at the same time? So it's born of the cloud startups. You're targeting folks that are doing development in the cloud. Yeah, you know, theoretically it could be anywhere, but is anyone developing anywhere else? No, I mean, under their desk, on a local host, but I mean, outside of that, you got to put it somewhere. I still have a rack at Equinix and I get laughed at all the time by like developers in the city. They're like, like, really, you have a rack? Like, do you have a router? It's a shrine, you know, come on. It's a nice badge of honor. It is cool. It's cool. So Jay, talking about, you know, kind of the changing expectations of the people, you know, the young kids that just sat through your presentation that have no idea of the reality that you described only 15 short years ago. I mean, how is the expectation and the behavior of the applications and connectivity and speed pacing against the reality of the old guys that are trying to keep up, as well as the new people that are using software and some other tricks. Has that completely flipped and are we able to keep up the guys kind of down into the engine room? Well, the good news is automation, virtualization, the ability to like, you know, attach a bunch of resources to a problem is not instantaneous, but I mean, just to give you an idea, if I had to increase bandwidth between Comcast and Netflix, you know, 15 years ago, that would have been a multi-month operation and investing millions of dollars in new gear. Now, even on the telecom side, I can deploy services incredibly fast and, you know, ethernet. I can just deploy another 10 gig interface, you know? I mean, so the technology has gotten to the point where we're not waiting for technology. I think that there's bureaucracy, there's regulatory, there's other kind of friction in some of this. There's, of course, the negotiation. That has not changed, right? So, you know, if I'm, you know, in a situation where I have, you know, to negotiate a paid peering agreement with a potential competitor or, you know, an upstream provider, I don't think it's a big surprise to you guys that that process is just as archaic as it was 20 years ago. What are the big issues technically in terms of the discussions here? I mean, there's some real alpha geeks here. I mean, there's a small group right now, first conference. What is the big technical issue in your opinion that people are focusing on? You know, that's a great question. I think, honestly, it's less of a technical issue. I think it's more of a architectural, you know, sort of strategic one, where you're going from a world where you have been a consumer of traffic exclusively, where you sit behind a service provider, like, I don't know, AT&T or something, and you just throw all your traffic through that port in the wall, and you say, okay, there it is, you know, good luck, to one where the content provider, the consumer of that traffic, is now stepping into a different architecture where they are in control of those relationships and those interconnections and, you know, that whole sort of backbone level of engineering. So that leap does require that the person at the enterprise who, it doesn't necessarily have to know how to configure that equipment, but they have to understand the sort of the qualitative security, economic constraints and realities around that world. And, you know, I think that's a good thing because it makes us all more secure and, you know, we want that clue inside of all these companies, but it is a leap. It's not something that needed to exist before probably a couple of years ago. So I want to switch gears and talk to you about some of the things that are happening kind of in the current event. I see cloud mobile and social's been big trend. iPhones, you know, 2007 launch, changing game, obviously mobility is a big part of it. The app craze is seeing all the valuations around control. Social media has certainly changed significantly now. You're seeing almost a trajectory. Some say it looks like the web or the early days where, you know, you were part of with dig and, you know, I was at Pontech in the early days where there was the first generation of kind of tinkering around with social, then it became the hype phase. But then, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the other infrastructures in place and you're seeing the trend towards social business where you're starting to see web presence. Then back in the days, you know, people had to have a website. What do I do next? These were the questions you mentioned that. So the web was put a website up and then it was kind of laughed at. People did business on the web. Digital became primary. Social was kind of laughed at initially. It's just, you know, for PR or for kids. Now you're seeing more systematic infrastructure. Yeah. So what's your take on that evolution? Do you think it's real? Is it going to happen sooner than later? Is there a bubble bursting? In what's your take on social media as it tries to get mainstream with the business impact? Well, I think us calling it social media is the first thing that's going to change. Like it's sort of like we finally figured out we were waiting for mobile to take off. Like when's the mobile market going to hit? And of course we all agree it's a mega trend. But what we finally figured out is it's actually not a category. It's just an additional screen. And once we understood that it kind of changed our way of interacting. I think social media is kind of the same thing. It's not that there is this category of social media that is now the new hotness. We're finally recognizing that it is simply that is what media is. And that is just the way we communicate. And that's the way we advertise our businesses. And that's the way we engage with our communities. It's just reality. So I don't think that like an enterprise today even has to necessarily do anything to make that real. It's just accepted as reality. I can tell you most of the companies I advise probably doesn't do most of their communication with their audience in places besides their destination websites now, right? On Twitter, for example. I mean just this conference where this is how we communicate with people. So it's different. So native, it's just basically no one's gonna talk about just it is what it is. It just is what it is. Yeah, and that's hard for me to, you know, when you fought the battle like building Dig and like, you know, establishing community and getting people to use social media and you're fighting and you're fighting. And now it's just taken for granted. There's a little grumpy old man to me who's like, get up, get up, I was there. We fought hard. But you guys found that, I mean, Dig was truly the first crowdsourcing dynamic. There was also tech forums and IRC all that stuff that we were familiar with. But then when you started getting into the dynamic where there was actually a forum and the dynamics, the crowds storming, the crowdsourcing. The crowds storming is sometimes very accurate. Storming the gates, take down that code. Let's talk about that a little bit because we talked a little bit about that off air and you were telling a story of kind of an early experience with Dig and social media where, you know, the crowd basically dictated, you know, kind of took over control of what they wanted to talk about. And I always find it interesting with the kind of really large enterprises that have so tightly controlled their messaging, so tightly controlled their logo access, so tightly controlled these things that are they really ready to kind of let somebody say stuff about you when there's going to be always some percentage that you don't necessarily like, agree with, or feel comfortable. So. And you're not in control. And you're not in control. So you could tell that little story before and you were progressive and on the front edge. This is very different than some of the Fortune 500s that are having to face this every day. And you know, and to some extent, you got to give a little bit of slack to the Fortune 500s who have been around for 20, 30 years and you know, the mediums are changing around them. So, and sometimes it's just from a corporate culture standpoint impossible for them to react to these changes. I mean, Dig, even we were shocked. Here we were a crowdsourced medium, you know, where buttons were on everyone else's website to, you know, dig stories and the actual homepage of the site was dictated by the users. That's the whole point of what Dig was, right? So to some extent it shouldn't have been a shock to us that users would start posting things that maybe weren't legal. And there was this thing with HDVD and Blu-ray. So I guess one of our users figured out how to crack the HDVD key and posted the HDVD key like the number code. So we're like, okay, that's whatever it's nerdy. No one's going to notice. But sure enough, you know, we get the DMCA. What is it? The cease and desist letter. And so we're like, well, what are we going to do? So we took it down thinking, well, okay, whatever. It's one story out of a million. Our users decided that wasn't okay and started resubmitting the story using the code as the title of the story. And then we would delete that and they would submit it faster. And then we create an algorithm and then they would create an alternative way of presenting the information. They had a guy who recorded himself on the video singing the code numbers. I love that. And this just, finally, we were getting like, I think two submissions a second and the whole site became 100% the HDVD key. There was no way to operate the business. Ads wouldn't load. Dogs and cats living together, a mass hysteria. And yeah, I mean, as wacky as that was, I mean, really the only way to solve the problem was to post a blog post that said the title of our blog post to our community was the code number and said, we give in, you win, you run the site, not us. And what happened on the legal side? Nothing because the reality is with any of that, you know, EFF guys will tell you this too. There's really nothing they can do, you know. The real solution turns out to be incredibly transparent. So communities will accept that you have legal responsibilities but you can't do it in a vacuum. You have to like, we ended up posting the cease and desist letters to this website called Chilling Effects, which, you know, the EFF I guess is involved in. And posting those things really made a huge difference because then when you consider users, hey, this thing we removed, here's why. No, complain about it with us, we're on your team, we're in this together. And that was probably the skill set we developed. Jay, talk about the current social network situation. I see Twitter had great earnings and they're trying to shift the game a little bit. They're starting to talk about words like producer, consumer, more traffic hitting their site that aren't logging in. So you're seeing people with the user experience for Twitter kind of struggling but they're changing. Facebook certainly kicking ass and taking names in terms of numbers and dollars and their ads are booming. And you got LinkedIn kind of doing the business thing, trying to be relevant there. Will there be siloed social networks continuing to come along? You see that trend. And then what do you think of Twitter relative to the crowdsourcing? Are they unique? Will they compete with Facebook? Give us your view of what's going on in the social network. Will there be a lot of social networks out there? Is there a long tail effect for networks? And then what about the big three? Well, that's great. That's a huge area of focus. Yeah, I do think that there is a place for different kinds of social networks that will appeal. If you go back to Gina Biancini and Mark Andreis and they co-founded Ning about, I guess, it's going to be like 10 years ago, the concept behind that business was, hey, there's probably a social network for everything. If you consider that, maybe product market timing wasn't quite right. I think that's becoming truer today. Now, can Facebook and Twitter own that? I think the majority. I think there's a certain inertia that's going to be hard to get by. Sort of like there were better search engines in Google that came out a few years after Google, but they couldn't beat the dominance of Google. Although they beat the ones that came out ahead of them. Well, that's absolutely true. They innovated. They chased the portal days. They chased the portals of the Google's estate through search. And I think there's a critical mass that you get to that makes it very hard to beat. Now, that being said, we've seen the rise of ephemeral applications, things like Secret and Whisper and chat applications So I think that there are sort of application specific opportunities for a while. That's where you're going to see innovations that I wouldn't say necessarily take share away from Twitter and Facebook, but certainly take airtime, particularly for digital natives and the growing teams. So take territory in a growing market. In a growing market. And then they get acquired, right? Right, right, right. Hopefully not shut down. Yeah, it'll be slow. I'm a big fan of Path, which is a sort of alternative mobile only social network. And there's room for innovation here outside of the big guys. Now, Twitter is kind of an interesting case though, because it's, I never really defined Twitter as a social network. The way I look at Twitter is it's more like, it's probably more akin to Sirius FM and Radio than it is a social network because everyone's got a radio station. Whether or not you happen to tune into their radio station is a whole matter. Vertical targeting media, very targeted. Country music is country music, right? That's right. And organizing all of Twitter into relevant ways is a whole line of business. There's all these companies that set up shop that basically focus on how to make Twitter interesting. And it's great as an advertising medium. I'm going to just say that I tried it. Like I was a total skeptic and then we rolled it out and we got a ton of clicks through conversions. So it's shocking how good it is. So there's, Twitter is to me like a communication medium that social networks use. It's almost like the replacement for email in a way. It is. Well, what's interesting is you can actually direct connect to someone via Twitter as if you had their email. Absolutely, it is, it's brilliant. You're broadcasting not radio frequency, but semantic data. Yeah, there's metadata. It's crazy and I love it for that reason. I do think that the noise on Twitter far outweighs the content and so I do think there will be a certain Twitter fatigue that happens over the next couple of years. And so I don't think it's ever going to go away but I do think that it's just not something that people are going to have running on their desktop 24 by seven watching the feed go by. And I think to me, my Twitter, I'm belly-bullish on Twitter, but to me my Twitter moment was obviously watching it grow up from the beginning was, watching how great it was as a medium, but when Susan made it on TV and they trumped Facebook, then that was when I had my URL moment like, okay, when it makes TV, you're on reach medium, then it's hard to displace that. So when you start seeing Twitter lose the TV position, I think then you're like, okay, then they're hurting, but until they're not losing it. But no one's trying to take it. You know, my co-founder of Revision 3, a guy named Kevin Rose, you may have heard of. Kevin actually launched a competitor to Twitter at Twitter's early days and arguably a better product called Pounce and it just didn't quite catch on. Anyway. So talk about your startup. Get the plug-in, we've got a new startup, Opsmatic, go into detail. What is it? Give us the quick. So Opsmatic, real quick version of Opsmatic. Opsmatic is a product for the DevOps side of your business. So developers and ops folk who are managing server infrastructure. And what it is, is an agent that you install in all of your servers that only detects change in configuration. And those changes are broadcast back to a central coordinator, which then basically has live state, real time of your entire infrastructure. So if you want to go back to last Thursday at three o'clock in the morning and see who logged in and what changed and what file dependency shifted when you ran this puppet run or the chef run, you can see exactly what happened. You're the drop cam for DevOps. Yeah. It's like drop cam and time machine for DevOps. Really, so you can go in and so from a troubleshooting standpoint, is that the primary thing or looking at optimization? Is that really the primary use case? Yeah, it's, you know, I think that any organization that is changing in real time, pushing stuff to production regularly, is basically in a position where entropy happens. Things change on machines that you don't expect to happen, which lead to things breaking. And the problem with that is that, that's expected, people embrace change, change is fine and entropy is fine and things break all the time. But being able to get to root cause and understanding sort of the situation, because in this world of managing Unix machines in particular, you have a thousand files on that machine, all that have some kind of impact. When you plan your automation, you're not thinking of all those files, you're just thinking of your services you're running, like Apache or, you know, MongoDB or whatever it is. So all of the dependencies and underlying file system, there's all these things that can go wrong and we shouldn't expect you to know to look. So for example, the OpenSSL thing that happened, the Heartbleed, just try and run a search across your 1200, you know, server instances for what version OpenSSL is running on all those machines. Our product, because it knows everything about every machine, you type OpenSSL into a search box, bam, it tells you the version on all of your machines and you can immediately go and localize this kind of stuff. It's, once you see it, do you realize that the opportunity as a platform is produced? Splunk has certainly got some success on the big data side with log files in a similar weird way, but not directly, but similar kind of advancement in terms of making it easier for folks to deploy and efficiently do stuff. Yeah, Splunk is fantastic. You know, the presumption is your log file has everything in it, right? And so our customers use both. Jay, great to have you here. We're at Pier 2.0 live here. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. Jay, we have a final word for you. What's next for you? Will you continue working on the startup? Other investments? What are you going to work on? Starting a venture capital firm. Okay, we should have another 30 minutes. How about that? You got the scoop here. The resumes are falling. Any timing on that? And you want to announce? It's happening. Not quite yet, but. Can you actually talk about raising money? I think that's technically now. You can do that, some sort of like law. You can't disclose, but we'll put it out there. I'm, you know, it's going to take me a long time, like a year, year and a half, but it's a lot of work and I'm just starting. Jay Ellison, serial entrepreneur here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest here. Peer 2.0, I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. We'll be right back. Thanks.